Matthew Arnold Quotes
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The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
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Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
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One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.
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The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.
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Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things.
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Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
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Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar.
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Only, from the long line of spray
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Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel - below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
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What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
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Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well - but ’tis not true!
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Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt’s rope chops round.